William henry fox talbot biography

William h fox talbot biography of alberta British Broadcasting Corporation Home. His father died when he was less than a year old and he and his mother lived in a succession of homes until she remarried in Talbot went to Cambridge University in In , while visiting Lake Como in Italy, his lack of success at sketching the scenery prompted him to dream up a new machine with light-sensitive paper that would make the sketches for him automatically. On his return to England, he began work on this project at his home at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

Biographies

H J P Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot; Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science
(London: Hutchinson Benham, Ltd, ).

This book, the standard biography of Talbot, outlines the full range of his activities and interests.

It is extensively documented and endnoted; the family trees and bibliography are a useful appendix. The illustrations, while numerous, are small and secondary to the text. Arnold's research was cut by about a third for publication (with the cuts mostly in non-photographic areas).

William h fox talbot biography of alberta canada His work in the s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature — , which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading , and York. A polymath , Talbot was elected to the Royal Society in for his work on the integral calculus , and researched in optics , chemistry , electricity and other subjects such as etymology , the decipherment of cuneiform , and ancient history.

The full unpublished text may be consulted in typescript at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock and in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin.


Gail Buckland, Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography  (Boston: David R Godine, ).

Buckland, the former curator of the Royal Photographic Society collection, gives a lively and sensitive account of Talbot's activities, concentrating on photography.

Whereas the text is less extensive and less documented than Arnold's, Buckland's selection of Talbot's images is superb. The quality of the monochromatic reproductions is uneven but the full colour reproductions give a very good sense of the originals.